Jewish-Catholic Relations Soured : Feelings Run High on Nuns at Auschwitz

Nuns praying silently for the 4 million dead of Auschwitz have provoked a dispute that is souring relations between world Jewry and the Catholic Church.

Jewish leaders outside Poland demand the removal of the small group of Carmelite nuns from a convent they established in 1984 in a warehouse attached to the former Nazi death camp.

The Nazis are believed to have used the building beside the camp’s outer walls to store the Zyklon-B gas, which killed at least 1 million Jews at Auschwitz.

Site Called Unique

Jewish leaders say that by settling at Auschwitz the nuns have usurped a site unique in Jewish history, the most symbolic of all monuments to the Holocaust, in which a total of about 6 million Jews died.

The church agreed in 1986 to move the nuns by last February, but work has not begun on a new convent planned to house them a few hundred yards away.

A Jewish group canceled a meeting in Rome with Polish-born Pope John Paul II this month and demanded an “effective reply to tragic misunderstandings” over the convent.

Father Stanislaw Musial, a Polish Jesuit priest who took part in negotiations on the dispute, said, “Our Jewish friends can be sure the convent will be transferred. It must happen soon because the issue could generate anti-Semitism in Poland.”

But Musial said work on the new convent could not start for months because land to build it on has not been bought.

“The nuns must have a stable place to go to. They can’t go from one temporary place to another. We can’t just play with the nuns as if they were Ping-Pong balls,” he said.

Many Poles want the nuns to stay on in the building, known as “the old theater,” arguing that it is outside the camp walls and that they pray for Jews and Catholic victims alike.

Jewish leaders want Auschwitz to remain almost as it was when it was liberated in 1945, a unique symbol of the Holocaust and a silent tribute to millions of dead.

They say that although the convent building is outside the camp walls, it was part of the camp because it was used to store the lethal gas. They are outraged by the wooden cross erected by the nuns just outside the camp wall near Block 11--the “Death Block” in whose courtyard 20,000 people were shot to death.

“There is a 23-foot high cross standing on the largest Jewish graveyard in history,” said a spokesman for the World Jewish Congress in New York.

The nuns, who belong to one of the strictest contemplative orders of the church, do not receive visitors and have made no comment.

Local feelings are running high, and residents angered at criticism of the nuns sent a protest last month signed by 1,375 people to Slowo Powszechne, a pro-government Catholic newspaper in Warsaw.

Musial said there were no intentions to mislead the Jews and called for calm.

“There is no plan to deceive the Jews. The Polish authorities are doing their best to carry out the decision (to build a new convent), but everything takes time,” he said.